Foreword: I'm allowing myself no more than 20 minutes to write this entry. Aaaaaaaaaaand go.

Solid day on the training side of things as I had the day off from work and all kinds of time on my hands. It's a nice luxury for sure, but a rare one. I'm very happy to have taken full advantage of it.

There was nothing special about any of my workouts today, but it did feel good to hit the track this morning and get a small taste of speed with a couple strides in between sets of drills. The idea was to just open up the legs a bit, and I figured I could keep things under control and run 5-minute pace without breaking stride. As luck would have it, I had the wind at my back and as such it was smooth sailing around the turn and into the straightaway. The times were a couple ticks faster than I expected them to be but the effort was right where it should have been.

And that concludes the training talk portion of today's entry. I've been racking my brain for things I should, could or might want to talk about for the better part of a week now and I came to the harsh realization that I don't have the mind-boggling mileage of this guy, the musical mind of this fella or the mindless back-n-forth banter of these two clowns. I do, however, have a dorky obsession with running shoes and ironically enough it happens to be the start of the Fall 2009 selling season in the world of specialty running retail. Rich and I have already looked at Saucony, tomorrow we've got Asics, Brooks rolls in on Thursday and every other vendor under the athletic shoe umbrella will make their presence felt sometime between now and the early part of 2009. It's easily the most wonderful time of the year for a specialty running store. With eight different vendors to look at, it's like Hanukkah for a Shoe Guy.

Bottom line, quite literally, is I'll do what I can within the constraints of confidentiality to share with you, my readers, what's hot and what's not in the running shoe world of the future.Stay tuned.